Connect/RE - build in an "Integration ID"?

John Ronan

I have an idea that I’d like some critique on:

In the good old days, when integrating Education Edge (EE) with Raiser’s Edge (RE), you could always tell precisely which record in EE was connected to which record in RE by looking at a field called “integration ID”.

So if, for example, you were confronted with 21 “John Smith” records in EE and 75 “John Smith” records in RE, you could always rely on the old integration ID to see which of the 21 was connected to which of the 75. This was a very helpful feature.

Alas, that doesn’t exist today with Blackbaud Education Management (BEM) and RE [via Connect/RE (CRE) ].

Though they must be using something like an “integration ID” internally that these system use to link the two, BB chose [and continues to choose] to keep it secret.

So here’s my idea for a way to clearly identify which two records in the two systems are connected:

In Blackbaud Education Management (BEM), tag every record with a unique value IN A FIELD THAT WILL SYNC OVER TO RE. This way, you can always check for matching values between records in the two systems to verify the link.

I would do this as follows:

In BEM, stick each record’s user_id into a “Summer” phone number. (This is a field that we do not use in either system and it conveniently syncs over. )

This way, if you’re wondering which of the 75 “John Smith” records your particular John Smith record is linked to, look for one that has the same Summer phone number.

Does anyone see anything wrong with this idea? I’ll admit that it requires a trivial change to *every* BEM record, which could result in a long running setup synchronization.

Also, we’d have to maintain new records this way.

Also, we have to ensure nobody uses the “Summer” phone number for anything else.

Are there any other gotchas ???

Thanks for listening.

Stephen Boyle

https://community.blackbaud.com/discussion/85148/connect-re-build-in-an-integration-id

Hi John,

I can tell you how we are handling that we the Common Records Engine, which will replace Connect RE.

Common Records will provide two options. You can save the BEM user ID as the RE constituent ID when creating new constituents in RE. Or you can store the Constituent import ID in the Host ID in BEM. These were early suggestions from our EAP clients using Common Records right now, and we quickly saw the wisdom of providing a common identifier.

So, while I can't solve this for Connect RE, you can expect some improvement in the very near future.

John Ronan

Thanks,

I had seen this in the new stuff.

Given that we won't be going there anytime soon, I'm looking for a stop gap.

Again….anyone with objections?

Tx.